


in the dead of night (blackbird fly)

by semprasektums



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (kinda), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - No Voldemort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arab Harry Potter, Biracial Harry Potter, Denial of Feelings, F/F, Female Draco Malfoy, Female Draco Malfoy/Female Harry Potter, Female Harry Potter, Genderswap, Girls with Guns, Gun Kink, Slow Burn, Unresolved Sexual Tension, also this might seem like a muggle au but i promise its not, does this even count as hpverse??? who knows, female draco malfoy plz hmu if u ac exist i am Begging you, honestly just a clusterfuck of my own projected trauma, mafia, not that im in the mafia uHHH, this is like a hurt comfort fic but without the comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27854410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semprasektums/pseuds/semprasektums
Summary: The one in which Draco is the sole heir to the Black and Malfoy crime syndicates and Harry is an MI6 agent with a perfect track record and a personal vendetta. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, mix in a whole lot of tension and a little bit of magic, stir on medium heat for ten years, and bam, a perfect lesbian love story, best enjoyed with a side of vanilla ice cream on a hot summer day.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 5
Kudos: 43





	in the dead of night (blackbird fly)

**Author's Note:**

> For someone who just wrote 20k words, I have no idea what to say. This is the first fic I've ever completed, and it took me a year and a half to do that. There's a huge gap in our fandom for plotty, intricate F/F fics, which is honestly pretty upsetting, so I hope this contributes to bridging a bit of that gap. This fic holds a lot of my heart within it; I've grown to love this beast I've created, and if you're reading this, I hope you will too.
> 
> Special thanks to Maro for his constant cheereading and for being one of three people who'll get all my references to Arab culture; to Eli, for promising to read this seven times and never actually doing it; to Zoha, for calling me a nerd and just existing in general; to Layan, for promising to hit me if I don't let her read this; to Oli & Filippa, for holding my hand through the earliest days. I love you guys so so so so much <3
> 
> Disclaimers: there's a lot of violence, and a good amount of substance use (cigarettes, shisha, alcohol) in this fic, as well as one scene with some description of sex trafficking. Read at your own discretion. Also, I 100% admit to stealing the idea of willstones from the Worldwalker series (SO GOOD), and maaaybe unconsciously getting the whole "pain demands to be felt" thing from TFIOS. Trust me, I'm not happy about that one either.

The thing about pain, Harry thought as she bled out onto the shining ivory floors, was that it does everything it can to make sure you feel it. It crawls beneath your skin like filthy parasites, twists into your veins like the flames of hell, squeezes your organs into whiskey wet rags until all you can do is feel God’s wrath crash into you, the waves of an Abrahamic typhoon you _surely_ deserve. And what is a woman to do, when so honestly presented with all the grime and glory of death, but to beg for one final dose of cosmic morphine?

Her. It’s always been her.

**_GODRIC’S HOLLOW, WEST COUNTRY, ENGLAND 1130 NOV 1 1986_ **

“Look, Moony!” Harry cried, tugging at the frayed end of his denim jacket, “Look what I’ve got! I have Kit-Kats, and Snickers, and Aeros, and Smarties, and— Aagh!” 

“Think you’re mighty cool, eh?” Remus replied, grin barely contained as he swung the little girl up into the air while she desperately clutched onto the long pointed witch hat she refused to take off. “Too cool for little old Moony, hmm?”

“No, I promise—” She attempted between fits of giggles, trying her best to climb up onto his shoulders and extend a hand down for him to shake, “I’ll give you a chocolate if you run me to the house?” 

“Sirius Black, is that you?” He rolled his eyes, but shook her hand anyway, her stubby little fingers enveloped entirely by his own. “Hold tight, Harriet.”

And so Remus Lupin ran to the Potter Cottage on the morning of November 1st, 1986 with Harry perched on his shoulders and a pillowcase of chocolates clutched in his fist, warmth coating his heart and dewy leaves crunching beneath his boots, the air infused with the smell of post-rain grass and childhood memories. What Remus Lupin did not know, however, was that as soon as he reached the top of those stairs on the morning of November 1st, 1986, he would simultaneously lose every single person he had ever loved, his heart shattering into a million tiny, irreparable pieces.

In a quaint little bedroom tucked into the second floor of a quaint little cottage, James and Lily Potter lay on their backs atop a king size bed with violet patterned sheets, fingers intertwined and eyes softly shut. In the doorway stood a little girl, roughly six years old, her hat falling over her bright green eyes and pillowcase clutched so tightly between her little fingers that her brown skin turned white with the force of it. A stab in the throat, a stab in the heart, a stab in the back: the mark of the Blacks. 

In the corner of that room, just a few steps away from the corpses of her parents, sat a beast, legs curled into a heaving chest. His hair was dark, messy, and tinged with blood, as if he’d spent hours raking his fingers through it, and his eyes were frantic, grey as storm clouds and dripping tears like last night’s rain. It was his arms that gave him away, though, soaked to the elbows in crimson blood. Later, she would be told that he was holding a knife; onyx black and wolf-headed, carved with three tiny initials that would keep a man behind bars for the remainder of his life: S.O.B.

Harry Potter did not scream when her parents were murdered. She did not cry, nor did she beg God to take it all back. She stood silently in the doorway and waited for Remus to come up, then sat silently in the police station as he screamed and cried and begged for them to let him keep her, then lived silently in witness protection for ten long, long years. 

Nothing that came after mattered much, as far as Harry was concerned. Because while it was only James and Lily Potter who were murdered on October 31st, 1986, it was Harry’s heart that was buried with them.

**_WESTMINSTER, LONDON, ENGLAND 2130 JULY 31 1997_ **

The second Harry stepped into _Al Hossam_ , thirty two pissed off, bearded Lebanese men unanimously turned around and stared back at her; it was like those old hollywood films where the damsel in distress walks into a dark, scary biker bar and is immediately overcome with jitters, a bunny in a fox den. And while Harry might arguably be in a constant state of slight to moderate distress, she was _no one’s_ motherfucking damsel. She would not be intimidated, by suspected mafiosi or otherwise.

The lounge itself wasn’t something Harry would consider especially intimidating; she’d scoped it out to be 150 square metres at most, with an easily accessible entrance up front. Although there were no windows, a quick rap of her knuckles against the interior confirmed her suspicion of drywall. Kaleidoscopic lanterns hung low from the ceiling, washing the velvet-lined walls in the type of dimness that allows a man to sink slowly into himself, the air stale with the type of smell that allows a man to forget everything else. An old record spun Um Kalthoum’s honeyed words into the air, wrapping herself swiftly around each man’s heart and escaping through their billows of smoke, floating through the room with all their laughter and twisted words. Something dark and desperate twisted in the pit of Harry’s stomach, a foreign feeling, long forgotten; something to do with the words _home_ and _sickness._ She tried her best to shove it right back to the gallows where it came from. 

While her memories of the time were more likely to be whimsical fantasy than fact, there wasn’t much Harry could do to forget the five summers she spent running barefoot through the alleyways of Baghdad, chasing kids who called her Haya instead of Harry and knew nothing better of England than to ask if she’d had tea with the queen yet, or if it was really true that in the west, every man got a Mercedes and every boy got to be David Beckham. While she tried to figure out the best way to tell her friends that she lived in West Country, not heaven, James and Lily sat a safe distance away in her grandmother’s cafe, sharing milkshakes and rolled cigarettes and talking politics with everyone and anyone who would care to listen. So no, this sleazy little wannabe speakeasy did not intimidate her, nor did the beady-eyed men in it; she had her fair share of experiences with Bad, Bad Men, the type who would make these bastards look like little boys in school blazers.

“Home won’t ever leave us alone, will it?” Cedric asked lightly, glancing over his shoulder to smile knowingly at her. It scared her, just how easily this boy, with his messy, sun-streaked hair and his perpetually twinkling eyes, could read her. Almost like he could sense her emotions before she even had the chance to.

Normally, Harry held back from the burning urge to admire, but right now, it was simply impossible to resist. He shone even brighter amongst the beasts and the bastards; pure and good, a true golden boy. She took a moment to admire the firm movements of his back through his white t-shirt, tucked safely into well-fitted black slacks. Then she took another for the soft hairs curling by the nape of his neck and the quiet glow of his ebony rosary beads, shined to perfection with a thousand silent prayers on missions just about to go wrong. He was nothing like the slimy, parasitical men that surrounded him; he positively glowed with power, an energy only given to those who God knows would never even think to misuse it. 

She wondered what type of long-buried tragedy it was that made him choose a life like this. Working for the MI6 wasn’t something you sought out or applied for; it was something that just happened to you, and then one day you’d wake up and ask yourself when exactly it was that you decided that this was how you wanted to define the word _normal._ She knew that for her, there was no choice; there was the horrors at night and there was this during the day, and that was that.

"No," Harry sighed to herself, following Cedric through the clouds of smoke, "It really won't." 

"Millie!" Cedric greeted as he reached the bar, smile warm and charming as ever, "Tal ghyebek." ( _Long time no see)_ He leaned forward and looked up at her expectantly until she rolled her eyes and kissed him three times; twice on the left and once on the right. 

“Hello Cedric,” She replied, pronouncing his name with the french _r_ and pulling the _i_ into an _ee._ She was built like a working woman, with broad shoulders and bright, hooded eyes, but her hands were soft, as if she only worked because she liked to. She looked at Cedric like she knew him deeply, in ways only forced proximity could create, and Harry squirmed internally. “Meen el ajnabeya?” _(Who’s the foreigner?)_ She asked, but there was no malice in her eyes when she looked at Harry, so she smiled and pretended she didn’t understand a word. Between her shaved head and her icy green eyes, Harry wasn’t very surprised that she didn’t pass much for an Arab.

“Millie, meet Julie. Julie, this is Millie. We met in—” Cedric began. 

“Prison,” Millie interrupted, just as Cedric said, “—boarding school.” Harry’s laugh was near genuine, and when her handshake was rejected for a kiss, she felt her insides twist at how little like a mission this had all begun to seem. She knew she had to stay focused, tear her mind away from these senseless sentimentalities, but between the smell of apple hookah and the twelve years she’d spent away from home, she just couldn’t bear to.

“Esh ile jabek hon? Ma kfeyt bil banat el european?” _(What brought you here? Not satisfied with European girls?)_

“El ha’ea ya Millie,” _(The truth is, Millie)_ Cedric said, the lilt of his words soft and smokey, “Ena fi asfura jet wi zaretny lalet ams.” _(That there’s a little bird that came to visit me last night)_

“Ah, anjad?” _(Oh, really?)_

“Mhm,” He continued, “Jet wi haketly ahla hkeya.” _(She came and told me the sweetest story)_ He leaned in further, his voice barely a whisper yet entirely audible, “Hkeya an el banat eli bitkhabuhm mini. Mosh eyb, heyk?” _(A story about the girls you hide from me. Rude of you, no?)_ He gave her a real, slimy grin, and for the first time, Harry saw something truly disgusting in Cedric: she saw all his want, and none of his fear. 

“Waladna keber!” _(Our boy’s all grown up!)_ Millie pinched his cheek, and Harry threw up inside her mouth, “Meen kan momken ekhamin ena malaakna Cedric hayetla’ alil adab heyk?” _(Who would’ve guessed that our little angel Cedric would end up so dirty?)_

“El haye malyena mfej’eyt.” _(Life is full of surprises)_ He pulled his glasses off and tucked them into his shirt, then gave a subtly unsubtle glance towards the wall behind her.

“Hawareek, bas bas ashan enta be’eyt sheb hlewa.” ( _I’ll show you, but only because you’ve become such a pretty boy)_ Millie laughed, and gestured for the two of them to follow her behind the bar, and towards a large, hanging portrait that was nearly taller than Harry herself. 

Behind the shining portrait of Jesus Christ was a mafia backroom that put all of Hollywood's depictions to shame. Plush velvet sofas were strewn around the soft carpeted room, and on each of the walls hung endless displays of forbidden luxury: they were surrounded by priceless antiques and surely-stolen artwork, blades still stained with blood and guns so meticulously ornate that if they were pressed to your skull you'd think of Michelangelo before you thought of God. The physical was only the tip of the iceberg, though; the entire room thrummed with power, so much so that Harry could swear that the ground was shaking beneath her boots.

In the center of the room lay the undeniable source of that power: Theodora Nott, flanked on both sides by men and women so achingly beautiful Harry couldn’t help but recall The Last Supper. She recognized some of the disciples from another case’s files: Pansy Parkinson, heiress to the Parkinson Real Estate fortune, Marcus Flint, son of legendary footballer and notorious lothario James Flint, and Blaise Zabini, star record producer Michael Zabini’s bastard child. She wondered which one of these rich, pretty faces would be their Judas.

She could hear Cedric’s charming “Esh rayek etwareny?” _(How about you show me instead?)_ , could feel her legs walk her right up to the table and sit her down as her partner swapped Arabic for English for French, could sense his absence from the room when he left with Theadora to a backroom of victims (conveniently connected to an alleyway exit, where all their men were waiting), and was just distracted enough not to care that she was making him do all the actual work. Because right where Jesus’ final meal should’ve been, perched silently on Lebanese mafia boss Theodora Nott’s lap had been Draco Malfoy, the most dangerous woman alive. 

Now, it would be very easy to assume that Draco Malfoy’s danger lay in her physical capabilities, for physically capable she was, and she certainly looked the part too, with her platinum hair cut sharply just below her chin and her slender body perfectly clad in cloth the shade of midnight, an array of knives always within arms reach. She had a face like razor blades, full of cheekbones so sharp they’d cut you if you brushed them and aristocratic bows bathed in the shape of old money, grey eyes tinged in blue frostbite and lips red as blood. 

Harry Potter knew a thing or two about beautiful girls, but beautiful was not a word fit to describe Draco Malfoy. It was a word made for soft girls who loved their husbands and respected their fathers, and knew nothing of blood bonding rituals or how to torture a man without killing him. Draco Malfoy had always been more weapon than woman; she was not beautiful. She was _deadly_. 

Despite Harry’s squirming discomfort towards her physical appearance, what made Draco truly dangerous had nothing to do with the sinful curves of her body (and _God_ were they fucking sinful), nor did it have anything to do with the glowing smoke stone hanging in the milky white hollow of her throat, doing everything it physically could to draw Harry in. No, Draco’s power did not lie in the animate world; it lay in the future, in all the things she could twist herself into becoming.

You see, Harry had dedicated the better part of the past ten years to researching the Blacks’ criminal empire, and she knew that Draco was both blade and key when it came to dismantling the whole goddamn thing. She was the sole heiress to both Black Scotch, the UK’s largest producer of Scottish whiskey and distributor of illegal drugs, and Malfoy Enterprises, the world’s largest private oil company and main suspect in a chain of illicit arms deals all over Europe and the Middle East. Draco Malfoy was a three-sided coin, and Harry had no fucking idea how she was going to land.

“There’s an old wives tale,” Draco said as she leaned into Harry, her voice low and smooth as skipping stones, “That our willstones have will.” 

“That they choose us, and not the other way around,” Blaise spoke from Draco’s left, lazily resting his chin in his palm, a man with all the time in the world. Harry noticed a gleaming silver snake twisting its way around his middle finger: the sign of the baby serpents. They all wore them, a crooked form of a children’s friendship charm.

“That they choose people and make us want them,” Pansy spoke from Draco’s right, her nearly-black eyes glowing with barely-contained mischief, “Lure them in, make us believe it’s real. Call it fate, or soulmates, or pheromones.” 

“And you believe that?” Harry asked, leaning forward to look Draco in the eye. 

“No,” Draco smirked, eyes gleaming. When she spoke, they all listened; she was both judge and jury, both choir and conductor. She revelled in the attention, glowed golden beneath the scrutiny. “I think it’s all us.”

**—**

Cedric Diggory knew everything there was to know about MI6 Case Focus #021A04 Theodora Nott: he knew she was born twenty seven years and fourteen days ago to a Lebanese mother and a French father, knew that she grew up tossed between gangs because they couldn’t decide what to do with her, knew that she harbored a strange affinity for barely-legal girls and that she slept on her right side because her left shoulder had been dislocated when she was nine years old and never set properly. He knew her shoe size and her favorite color, knew how she took her tea and what type of cigarettes she smoked when she was particularly stressed. What he didn’t know, however, was that she could smell a clean man from a mile away, and Cedric was as clean a man as they could come.

So really, he shouldn’t have been surprised that the second he laid a finger on her wrist, Draco Malfoy dragged him back to the main room by what seemed like sheer will alone.

“Kha’en!” _(Traitor!)_ Theodora screamed, eyes aflame with rage, “Ha’ata’ rejleyk men eydeyk we a’kalk le klebi el jawena.” _(I will tear you apart, limb by limb, and feed you to the fucking dogs.)_

In the quarter of a second that it took Harry to whip a revolver out, Theodora had ripped Cedric apart with her bare hands. Streaks of crimson blood lined his chest, his hand clutching his heart, black rosary beads slipping through his fingertips. Harry was sure that Theadora Nott _was_ the dogs, so she shot her square in the chest before she had the chance to devour him.

“D’you reckon you could help me?” Cedric asked, smiling. Cedric Diggory was bleeding out onto the carpet, seconds away from facing the grim reaper, and he was smiling. 

When he closed his eyes, Harry ran. They were beasts, so she ran and she ran and she ran. She ran past Draco, who was wracked with dry, terrified sobs as she clutched Theadora’s face, begging her to “Wake up Thea, please Thea please wake up wake up wake up fuck.” She ran past thirteen girls with empty eyes, strewn across the hardwood floors and barely aware of her presence, too doped up to realize, or care that they were about to be sold away. She ran past all the dead men that littered the alleyway, through the dark, winding streets of central London, and up to the Thames, where she stuck her fingers down her throat and begged her body to throw up everything that had happened, pour the whole night out of her till she collapsed into herself, a million unanswered questions swarming her mind. ( _Why was she still here? Why did they let her live? Why was it always her who got to survive when she was always the one who least deserved it?)_

On the night of July 31st, 1997, beneath streetlights mistaken for stars and midst rotting garbage washed up by the edge of the river, Harry Potter decided that she knew three things and three things only: first, that her parents were killed by the Blacks; second, that Cedric Diggory was killed by the Malfoys; third, that one day, she would kill Draco Malfoy with her bare hands.

**_MALFOY MANOR, WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND 2245 DEC 31 2002_ **

When Harry Potter looked at people, she could tell exactly what they were made of.

She could tell where they came from, how old their money was, if they had it at all. She could tell if a man was armed by the raise of his eyebrows, could weed out a spy by the way the light shone through her eyes. When you grow up the way Harry Potter had to, you waste no time coming to the realization that pretty distractions are an unaffordable tax when the price was staying alive.

After all, “Julie Rubeus Michaels” had lived ten long years in the tiny village of Aldsworth, Gloucestershire, under the witness protection of the man himself; and as loving as he may have been, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service was not a man whose house you could sneak out of, nor whose temper you could cross. And then she’d spent five years after that busting her ass in the nation’s most rigorous police and military training academy, hidden beneath the streets of London herself.

She’d watched her first crush die before her eyes, went to his funeral instead of senior prom. When everyone else her age was getting smashed at freshers week, she was on a stakeout mission in the unforgiving deserts of the empty quarter, no music but gunshots and ticking time bombs, a hands-on dismantling class. She’d had knives, bullets and molotov cocktails alike hurled at her in blurs of maddening fury, and yet here she was, alive and well with all but a few scars to show for it, dressed in a slit dress as dark as the night above her and standing in the middle of the Malfoy Manor’s foyer. She was surrounded by a blur of guests whose bodies were adorned in the finest silks and purest diamonds, yet whose brains were filled with no more than horse shit. But if they were horse shit, then Harry was the flies that buzzed around them; if these men and women didn’t stain the country with their corruption and filth, then what would Harry be spending her life cleaning up? Something less bloody, she hoped.

“ _You say you miss me and I wanna say I miss you so much..._ ” a voice as soft as spring sun drifted through the room, wrapping itself around Harry’s limbs and gently pulling her forward. On a small, parqueted stage were three alternate versions of the same girl: to the left, a brown-skinned girl with big, curly hair wore a dress as red as her lips and broke her violin’s heart with every stroke of her bow; to the right, a freckled girl with flaming red hair wore a dress as green as her eyes and caressed the keys of her piano as if this was the only way she knew how to love; nestled between the both of them, a girl with skin like moonlight and hair like the sun wore a pitch-black dress as velvety as the voice escaping her, blue eyes staring directly into Harry’s green. “ _But something keeps me really quiet..._ ”

Normally, Harry would be wary of the fact that she was being singled out when she was meant to be blending in, but something told her that this was not an alarm. _You are not prepared for what this night holds,_ the three girls warned, threatening danger hidden between floating notes and swirling champagne. Although she might be caught amidst a castle of beasts, at least there were three golden sirens on her side. 

The thing was, though, was that she was nothing if not prepared; the second Rubeus had assigned her to gather intel for the Black case, she knew exactly what it would entail: a lot of parties and a lot of pretending, both practices which Harry had many, many years to acquaint herself with. She knew that in order to get anything out of these snobby socialites, she had to know exactly how they thought, had to learn all the dirty secrets that kept them up at night. So, for the first time in sixteen years, she’d headed straight back to her childhood home, back to the pretty little cottage on the edge of West Country where her rawest thoughts and dirtiest secrets were held, where all her brightest dreams and most vivid nightmares had been born.

She’d arrived at Godric’s Hollow just before the strike of midnight on Christmas Eve, and couldn’t help but think about how fitting the name was for a place like this. It was entirely untouched and hollow of anything with a soul; even the marigolds in the back garden had wilted and blown away a long, long time ago. The floor creaked uneasily beneath her feet, but Harry found that ultimately, this house accepted her. _You belong with us,_ it whispered, _You hollow, empty thing._

She then spent three days and three nights going through every single piece of physical evidence that James and Lily Potter had left behind. She knew her mother had been an artist, could still recall the warm summer days she spent sitting in her mother’s lap as she painted canvas after canvas, and when she eventually ran out of those, the walls of every room she could. It was sitting in those very rooms, enveloped in swirling colors and dreamy lines, that Harry learned that even ghosts could love you, and that sometimes, there wasn’t much to do but love them back.

She also knew that her father had been a journalist, could perfectly remember the chilly winter days she spent wrapped up in his lap as he read book after book after book, and wrote page after page after page until even his trusty old typewriter decided that enough was enough, and insisted that he take his daughter out to the yard, where she would chase after burying ferrets and shake the snow off of dying leaves. What she didn’t remember, however, was her father hiding things, or why he hid them, or how to fucking un-hide them

One of the things Harry had found during her salvation of the dusty Potter Cottage was a big, brown chest tucked into the corner of James’ study, seemingly unlocked yet absolutely impossible to open. By the time she’d reached the top floor, Harry was already running on roughly 34 hours of no sleep, and when paired with the fact that she’d read every single political analysis James had ever written, things weren’t looking too good for her sanity. 

It was after several bouts of hysteria and senseless banging that Harry lay her hands flat against the well-worn leather of the chest and whispered, eyelids fluttering like baby butterfly wings and heart stuck in her throat, “I promise to protect you.”

> _“But Mommy!” Harry squealed as she ran away from Sirius, who was chasing_ _after her with the threat of tickles, “What about the witch hunters!”_
> 
> _It was the morning before Hollow’s Eve, and night had begun to stretch so long that the bluebirds were still singing at 9 AM. Six year old Harry was so thrilled by the prospect of free candy that she was all dressed up already, her tiny body tucked into a long black dress and her unruly curls hidden beneath a large, pointed hat, little pieces of paper taped to her fingertips to resemble claws. It had been her idea to dress up this way, and the “adults” around her were both immensely amused by the stark irony of it all and also so helplessly whipped for Harry that they wouldn’t even think to say no._
> 
> _“Those aren’t real, baby,” Sirius grinned at her, his entire face glowing as he finally caught up to her, crawling on his knees in the muddy grass so they were at eye-level, “But vampires are!” He bared his teeth at her and she screamed, running straight into James’ lap._
> 
> _“I’ve got you, pumpkin,” James said, wrapping his arms around his baby daughter._
> 
> _At the other end of the yard, Remus was pretending to chase Sirius with Harry’s toy broom. Lily was doubled over in uncontained laughter, face going red with the effort, “These are the men you trust!?” She yelled at James, but there was nothing but love coating her words._
> 
> _James refused to entertain the overgrown children in his backyard and just rolled his eyes instead. “I promise to protect you,” he told Harry, his eyes warm and solid as the earth below._
> 
> _“All the way from here?” Harry asked. He wouldn’t be coming to her sleepover with Moony and Padfoot, since he and Lily had a date night._
> 
> _“All the way.” James promised, and Harry believed him._

And so the chest clicked open. Inside it, Harry found three things that would change her life forever: a file of wire transcript records that successfully linked the Black Scotch Company to London’s thriving underground drug ring, a long velvet cloak that smelled exactly like her father, and a blank piece of paper. The first two she kept hidden away in a safe beneath her bed, but the third she carried everywhere. She could feel it right now, tucked into the garter that wrapped around her thigh, right beside her 6-inch blade.

Despite all her preparation, something felt off about the night of December 31st, 2002. Part of it was the simple fact that Harry _knew_ the Black and Malfoy crime syndicates were joint, but no one would believe her; in fact, most didn’t even believe a Malfoy crime empire _existed_ . With every paper she read and every journal she unearthed, Harry grew more and more certain of the one thing she’d known all along: that everything led right back to Draco Malfoy. The sole fact of her existence enabled a coalition of business and pleasure that London’s gangs had never seen before; she had a multiverse of power just within arms reach— all she had to do was _want_ it. And yet despite that, Harry couldn’t trace a single violent crime back to her in five whole years; she was sure there had to be _something_ more _,_ some form of physical evidence that would tie it all up. But for now, Draco Malfoy remained an inscrutable mystery of a girl; a jigsaw puzzle, with one piece missing.

The other part of the uneasy feeling swirling in Harry’s untouched champagne glass was something she couldn’t quite explain with words: an anxious buzz of energy floating through the air. It was raw power, the likes of which she had only encountered twice before: what was presented to her the day Cedric died, and what began to grow within her the day her parents did. Deep down, she knew exactly what it was: five letters that held so much more than a single word ever should. But Harry wasn’t insane, and she wouldn’t have anyone else believing so either, so she pushed her worry down to the pit of her stomach and decided to focus on a more pressing matter instead. So, she opened the bathroom door.

When Harry Potter looked at people, she could tell exactly what they were made of. But when she looked into Draco Malfoy’s eyes at 11:55 PM on New Year’s Eve, she saw nothing at all. 

**—**

_“I can see my baby swinging…”_

Harry Potter had spent the better part of five years fantasizing about the day she would meet Draco Malfoy again. She imagined herself the noble leader of a series of sting operations that would lead them directly into the lion’s den, where she’d catch her red handed; or perhaps she’d be the cherry on top of a swift dismantlement of the entire London drug ring, wiped to dust by Harry and her team of mysterious agents, each with a tragic backstory and a pretty face; or maybe she’d arrest her on a claim of treason against the state when she found her shaking hands with a known terrorist in the lonely saharas of the Middle East. But not once in five years did Harry dream that she’d reunite with Draco Malfoy in a motherfucking bathroom of a New Year’s party, all dressed up and with no viable motive. What she also didn’t expect was for her to look so fucking _good._

Everything in Harry’s life had changed, but Draco Malfoy stood still, as if waiting for the rediscovery. The fear had left her, though, and her platinum hair was slightly longer now, brushing her pretty collarbones and framing her face. She was a little bit taller than Harry, but then again that could have easily been the red bottoms she wore, sharp enough to act as a weapon in and of themselves. She really was deadly; her lithe frame was draped in a silk slip dress that fell perfectly at mid-thigh, stained the color of midnight and doing a maddening job of accentuating every delicate dip and curve of her body. Harry noticed several swirling black lines decorating her milky white skin, and had to hold herself back from the overwhelming urge to _touch._ Gone were the flickering flames of youth, but in their place was a roaring, steady fire, burning beneath her skin and glowing through the smoke colored stone hanging around her neck. 

_“His Parliament's on fire and his hands are up…”_

Draco let her storm-colored eyes pour into Harry’s, rain in a twisted forest. In her dilated pupils Harry saw the answer to every question she’d ever asked, the key to every locked door in her mind. She could _feel_ her as she moved closer, all the way in until their faces were only a whisper apart. Could feel the vibrations of her pretty throat as she hummed to the distant music. 

“People are like snakes,” Draco said, her words lulled in the slur of alcohol and God knows what else, and pulled a ring off of her finger. She reached for Harry’s hand, and Harry let her take it, shivered at the feel of soft fingertips against her own, careful and able as they slipped the cold metal through her knuckles. “They shed skin and regrow.”

_“On the balcony and I’m singing…”_

The thing about Draco Malfoy, Harry thought, was that she had a face like shattered glass. In her she saw her filthiest vices and her purest virtues, the things she smoked when she wanted to forget and the things she held onto when she needed to remember. She was a serpent through and through, and had somehow managed to build a home for herself behind Harry’s shaking ribs and right next to her heart: a brilliant vantage point, if one ever thought to strike.

_“Oh baby I'm in love…”_

Draco took her hand and pulled it up to her willstone, gently wrapping Harry’s fingers around it. Draco’s eyes fluttered shut and Harry had to take a long, deep breath to steady herself; it was as if every nerve in her body was on fire, warmth and power flowing through her at an unimaginable concentration. When she looked up, she found a dozen baby pink butterflies floating through the room. 

“Soft, pretty magic,” Draco whispered, staring at the ground, and the vulnerability in her words was so out of character Harry had to pinch herself to make sure it was real. She looked up, and her eyes were light and glassy. “That’s all I can do now…”

_“You push it hard, I pull away, I’m feeling hotter than fire…”_

Draco mouthed along to the words as they floated into the room, and now Harry was dead sure that she was way too drunk to recognize her, because if she did, she definitely would not be looking at her like that. Like Harry was the answer to every question she’d ever asked, the key to every locked door in her mind.

_“Boy, it’s you I desire…”_

Draco looked like she was dying to kiss her, her red lips parted slightly and her eyes aflame, and just for a second, Harry let herself forget; she let herself forget everything they were, let herself forget that she was Harry Potter and that was Draco Malfoy, let herself forget that they lived in a world were those words meant two very different things. Their lips were a millisecond away from collision when Harry realized just how long she’d wanted this, how badly she ached for it, how every bone in her body seemed to be screaming _moremoremore._ And then the door flew open. 

_“I can see my sweet boy swaying…”_

In the ebony doorframe stood a man wearing a black suit over a black button-up. His long, dark hair was pulled back in a seemingly effortless bun, threaded with white baby’s breath. Dark tattoos peaked out from beneath his collar, and Harry could see a million and two demons swirling in the grey of his eyes. How had they forgotten to lock the door? Harry _always_ locked the fucking door. Draco sensed the tension beneath her skin and tightened the hand on her waist; even when drunk off her ass, her instinct was always to protect.

_“He’s crazy y Cubano como yo…”_

In the ebony doorframe stood a beast, his clothes tattered and muddy and his chest heaving with the effort to remain conscious, as if he’d just fought a hundred men. His hair was dark, messy, and tinged with blood, as if he’d spent hours raking his fingers through it, and his eyes were frantic, grey as storm clouds and dripping tears like last night’s rain. It was his arms that gave him away, though, soaked to the elbows in crimson blood. In his left hand was an onyx black blade with a wolf-head, carved with three tiny initials that were meant to keep a man behind bars for the remainder of his life: S.O.B.

_“On the balcony and I’m saying…”_

In the ebony doorframe stood Uncle Padfoot, dressed in a crop top riddled in artfully positioned holes and wrapped up in Moony’s frayed denim jacket. His hair was wind-tousled and his cheeks were bitten red with cold, and Harry could see a million and two stars swirling in the grey of his eyes, begging to be threaded into constellations. He smiled at her like he knew her and looked at her like he loved her, and when he stepped forward, Harry wanted to let herself break.

_“Move baby I’m in love.”_

Then, a storm poorly disguised as a girl barged in, and caught Harry’s wrist firmly in her hand. It was the dark-skinned siren from before, her expression both deeply understanding and disapproving. “No,” she said, and pushed Harry’s hand down from where she’d been holding a blade against Sirius’ neck. 

The other two followed shortly afterwards, and then there were six people standing in one bathroom, each more powerful than the next. The air was thick and thrumming with energy, and Harry just couldn’t fucking take it. The last thing she thought before she blacked out was that it was about time she got a pretty stone necklace, too. 

**—**

Lucius Malfoy spent all of New Year’s Eve hiding in the shadows of his own home; or that’s what it felt like to him, at least, since that useless excuse for a double agent was taking ages to show up. He could feel the night weighing down upon him, sinking into the soreness of his bones and heaving through his lungs as he coughed, dry and tinged with blood; he couldn’t wait much longer. Lucius adjusted the lapels of his suit jacket and glanced at the watch glittering on his wrist: it was 11:55 PM, already. Just as he was about to walk away, a shadow crept up the stairs.

“Apologies, sir,” Pius Thicknesse said, his words jittery and his nose sniffling, “You must know that you host one hell of a party.” He smiled, and an insidious mixture of grime and filth dripped from between his teeth. 

“Spare me the pleasantries, will you.” Lucius said, in a tone which perfectly enunciated just how unpleasant he found Thicknesse to be, “Are those sniffling bastards at the MI6 still digging around?”

“Oh yes sir, we should expect them to stick around for quite some time now, you know how they are, stubborn lot… but it’s all low profile sir, nothing to worry about… they haven’t found anything substantial for quite some time now, oh yes, we haven’t given the dirty bastards any chances…” Thicknesse rambled, his face twitching oh so slightly as he spoke, “Made sure the case ran cold, you know, sir, I have been working quite hard for some time now, and I’ve been thinking— ”

“Oh, shut up, you imbecile,” Lucius sighed, attempting to rub the incessant migraine out of his temples, “Have you noticed anyone who’s particularly out of place?” 

“Well, there is this one girl, Julie Michaels, nosey lass, yes, a bit too curious for her own good, that one… had our eye on her for quite some time now, but she never does much, always listening…”

“That’s her fucking job, you absolute knob,” Lucius muttered beneath his breath, too bone-tired to be properly angry. “Keep an eye on her.” He ordered.

“Yes, yes, will do sir… you take care of yourself, now, sir, we need another heir out of you!” Thicknesse laughed awkwardly, slowly snaking out of his boss’ presence in the hope of snorting a couple more lines before sunrise. 

But for all that Pius Thicknesse was an absolute fucking wanker, he was right about one thing; for as much as Lucius Malfoy loved his daughter, he could not deny that she was a weak link— emotional, impulsive, too much Black and not enough Malfoy. And after all, what kind of man would he be if he placed the entirety of Malfoy Enterprises into the impotent palms of one little girl? 

**_THE BURROW, DEVON, ENGLAND 0125 JAN 1 2003_ **

The first thing Harry could think of as she began to come to was whether or not it was normal for snakes to fly, blood red and swirling right before her eyes. She thought she saw some fish too, pretty blues and yellows and purples, dancing across the dim, unfamiliar ceiling. And then someone slapped her real hard, and Harry went “Ungh,”

“Hermione, she’s alive!” a boy said, his voice echoing from somewhere very far away. Slowly, she began to remember: a party, a bathroom, a knife, _somewhere safe_. Harry looked down and saw blood on her hands. 

“Ron, for fuck’s sake—” a girl began, but Harry didn’t care about the rest. She tried to get up, but the blood oozing out of her guts wouldn’t let her. And yet still she tried, until she was propped against the wall and staring out into the room.

In a cozy little living space littered with pretty trinkets, souvenirs, and odd floating objects were three deadly sirens, a runaway murderer, the sole heir to two of London’s largest crime syndicates, a ginger boy wearing polka dotted pajama bottoms, and Harry, bleeding out onto the otherwise perfectly pristine hardwood floors. She tried to get up, but her knees gave out beneath her and she crashed into the floor, right back to where she came from.

“Harry, you have to let us hel—” Hermione pleaded, but Harry didn’t care for handouts. 

“I don’t have to do shit.” She couldn’t walk, so she crawled instead, her head throbbing with the power of a million flaming suns, hands and knees scraping against the floor. All she saw was red, red, red; the room was drowning in it, seeping through the floorboards and staining the pretty, floral wallpaper. 

And then there was Sirius Black, splayed out in the midst of it all with his perfect suit and his perfect hair and his dead, empty eyes, and Harry could feel ghosts swirling inside her bones. For a second, she thought she saw the shadow of a smile, saw in this shell a shadow of the Uncle Paddy who carried her on his shoulders and chased her across the yard and tucked her in at night and loved her more than all the stars in the sky. 

The thing about Harry and being afriad was that she just didn’t give a fuck— she wasn’t scared of death or heights or spiders or God —after what happened, her body had evolved so that fear was a chemical formula that just couldn’t be registered by the enzymes of her brain. 65% water, bones wrapped in nerves and muscles and blood and skin, ugly thoughts that kept them up at night and a heart that was never taught to work just right, those were the things that made a man. So how could Harry be scared of Sirius Black, when all of those things lived inside of her, too?

For the first time in 15 years, there were no physical or social barriers keeping Harry from beating the shit out of Sirius Black, and Harry loved beating the shit out of people. So she pounced, heard the sound of his skull reverberating against the floor, gathered every ounce of boiling, dirty hatred and missed childhood memories into her fists and let go. 

Fifteen punches for fifteen missed birthdays. Two kicks in the gut for the two empty seats at her sixth form graduation. He just took it, said nothing, didn’t even try to hit back or get her off, as if he too believed he deserved it. And he did deserve it, so she kept going. A broken nose for her broken home, cracked ribs for the best friend she’d lost, another for the self hatred she was given instead. Two more kicks in the gut for two people she’d never get back, no matter how hard she hit or how much he bled. Ten more punches for ten long, silent years spent in witness protection, trusting no one and loving even less. Two hands wrapped around his neck for the image of Remus burned bright into her brain, sobbing and begging, on his knees in a filthy police station. 

_Let me keep her,_ Remus had screamed, tearing his hair out of his own skull as two officers pulled him away by the arms, _let me keep her, she’s mine she’s mine she’s mine I have nothing left pleasegodpleasepleaseplease._

 _You’re too close_ , they told him, _he might come back, it’s just not safe._ Harry was pretty fucking close now, alright, close to squeezing the life out of this motherfucker’s eyes and sending him right back down to where he came from. She thought she felt arms trying to pull her off, push her off, peel her fingers off, anything at all, but she didn’t budge. 

“He didn’t fucking do it!” Draco screamed, and Harry let go, more out of shock than anything else. Then she noticed everyone else had been screaming too, but she only heard Draco. 

“Alright,” Harry said, pushing herself back against the wall as Sirius gasped for air, “Alright.” 

“I will very nicely agree to not kill all of you,” Harry panted, blood both hers and not slipping through her fingertips and her vision taninted and blurry, “under three conditions,” she hooked her claws into all the energy floating through the air, twisted it through her agony and spit it right back out, “three,” the room filled with gasps, grunts, heavy breathing, “fucking,” _Stop! Har— Stop!_ “conditions.” Bodies writhed, but Harry went on. 

“One,” Harry pounded her fists into the ground, and a neat circle of bodies dropped to the floor, “you all sit the fuck down.”

“Harry, you don’t have to—” Hermione started, but Harry slammed her jaw shut with a wave of her hand. 

“Two,” she said, “someone passes me a goddamn smoke.” 

Draco tossed a pack of Dunhills across the floor, followed shortly by a box of matches. Harry struck one, lit, inhaled, exhaled. The swirling smoke distorted her features into something closer to how she felt inside: rotten and sinister, shrouded in the shame of compulsion. 

“Three,” she continued, “I ask the questions,” she scanned the room with her eyes, irises lit up with flaming power, made sure everyone knew _she_ was the blade and _they_ were the chopping block, “and you give me the answers.” 

Harry took another puff of her cigarette, let the peppermint and nicotine swirl around in her brain and run through her gushing blood. “Where did you take me?” She sent out another jolt of pain, a quick reassertion of her power, “If any of you lie, you all die.” 

“The Burrow,” the ginger boy said; Rob, or Rock, or something like that. He seemed to be the only one home, his eyes still bleary with sleep and his scarred torso covered in freckles. There was a nagging feeling in a faraway back alley of her brain that insisted that it was safe to trust him, that in another universe, she knew him inside out. Harry shut that part off from the rest of her gushing thoughts and focused on the pain instead. When he spoke again, there was no fear, no rush— as if he knew exactly how to calm her down. “We’re in Devon, just by St. Catchpole. No idea why you’re in my house or how you knew to come here. Or who the fuck you are, really, but hey, not the weirdest thing to come out of this lot.” 

“We didn’t take you anywhere, Harry,” Hermione explained, speaking slowly now, as if afraid to startle the beast, “You brought us here. I’m guessing you used apparition, although I have no bloody idea how you pulled that one off. Technically, it’s impossible to side-along without physical contact, and you were only touching Draco. Also, you don’t have a willstone, so technically, it should also be impossible for you to do any sort of magic at all, aside from perhaps blowing bubbles, or blooming flowers, but definitely not apparating six people at once.”

“But why would I come here?” Harry asked. The words “magic” and “willstones” rang in her ears like tinnitus, but she held back.

“I haven’t exactly figured that one out yet,” Hermione replied, almost annoyed that there was a question she couldn’t answer, “When you apparate, you’re essentially relocating yourself from one spot and simultaneously appearing in another, as quick as the thought that prompts it. But as far as I’ve read, not even Dumbledore himself can apparate to a place he’s never been before.”

The last thought that had floated through Harry’s shock-stricken brain wasn’t exactly something she could explain— it was more abstract than concrete, less words and more emotions. She remembered the citrus scent of her mother’s perfume, the warmth of being enveloped by sheets fresh out the dryer, the sweetness of hot cocoa burning her taste buds as rain spattered against the slightly cracked window, the pretty _tap tap tap_ of water against glass. _Somewhere safe,_ she’d thought.

Harry shook her head as if to clear it, and finally asked, “Who are you?”

“That,” the red haired girl replied, and Harry noted that this was the first time she’d spoken; her voice hadn’t been among those screaming earlier. She pointed to the dark-skinned girl, whose hair had grown even bigger from all the nervous raking it had endured, “is Hermione Granger. She’s had an unhealthy obsession with the Godric Hollow murders since before most of us even learned to read, and is the self-appointed President of Everything. Although, to be fair, she’s more than capable.” 

She pointed to the blonde haired girl next, who was busy admiring the dust mites shining in the moonlight, “That’s Luna Lovegood. Hermione hates her—” _I do not! Ginny—_ “but her father has copies of practically every single magical newspaper ever printed, so we keep her around. Also, she’s pretty hot.” The ginger girl grinned slyly, and Harry was keenly reminded of a fox. Luna smiled and waved, a far away look on her soft-featured face. 

“That’s my brother, Ron,” She pointed at the ginger boy, who was still shirtless, but now held a throw-pillow over his torso, as if that helped, “He’s the only one of us that still lives at home, because he’s a wuss and a mummy’s boy—” She was very rudely interrupted by a pillow in her face. 

“Ginevra Molly Weasley,” she continued, pointing at herself and grinning widely, “Also known as Ginny. I’m only here because I like beating people up.” That got a snort out of Harry, and she slightly relaxed her grip, earning a collective “oomf” from everyone in the room. _They’re on your side,_ her gut told her, and she decided to listen. 

Harry turned her attention to Draco, who was sitting cross-legged, elbow resting on her knee and head placed casually in her gentle palm, seemingly collected despite her bloodshot eyes. Harry made a point of staring directly there, and not anywhere below. “If Sirius didn’t kill my parents, then who did?” 

“We did,” Draco replied, the corners of her lips pulling upwards, teasing. Harry focused on the energy in the room and twisted, pulling from the pain pooled in her belly and pushing it all out. The others grunted in discomfort, but Draco only smiled wider. She was a serpent, and serpents thrived in agony. “Then we framed Sirius, because he’s a filthy scumsucker and always has been. Well, it’s not exactly _we_ anymore, though, seeing as I’m about to get disowned, but—” 

Before she could say another word, Harry slapped Draco, hard and fast, a satisfying _smack!_ resounding through the room. Everyone froze for a second, then two, as if anticipating the oncoming avalanche, deeply concerned yet powerless to stop it. Then, Harry was being slammed into the ground, wrists held firmly above her head. 

“I don’t give a _fuck,_ ” Draco hissed, her face only centimeters above Harry’s own, her eyes filled with a sort of malice she hadn’t seen in a long, long time, “If you’re some sort of magical prodigy,” _If you lift your head up just a little, you’d be kissing,_ Harry’s very useful brain quipped, “Or if you’re actually the Chosen One,” Harry struggled and squirmed, but Draco’s weight was solid atop hers, her thighs wrapped tightly around Harry’s quivering midsection, “Hell, I don’t care if you’re Merlin himself,” Harry attempted to get ahold of the energy in the room, tried to twist it to her favour, but it slipped through her fingertips like hot sand; she couldn’t focus, no matter how hard she tried, “You do _not_ touch me.” Then she rolled across the floor and passed out.

Harry pushed herself up by the elbows, slowly, and let herself look at Sirius, look at him _properly_ , for the first time that night. He looked good— his suit dark, expensive, and tailored just so; his newly salt and pepper beard perfectly groomed; his hair black as the night and artfully pulled up, as effortlessly beautiful as always. He was the spitting image of everything a Black was meant to be: dark, handsome, and mysterious, a pure-bred wolf among the stray dogs. Harry thought of every night she’d had a nap for dinner and every winter she’d had more holes in her coat than pounds in the bank, and she resented the fuck out of him. Harry Potter hated Sirius Black because he was everything she wanted, and everything she’d never be able to have.

But she couldn’t deny that he looked equally terrible— no amount of money or glittering extravagance could cover up how his skin clung to his bones with no mediator, how the bags beneath his eyes carried a decade and a half of night horrors and insomnia, how his smile, once as bright as all the stars he was named after, was now weak, empty, hopeless. Harry looked at this skeleton, this shell of a man she’d once loved as much as the father she’d never gotten the chance to truly know (because really, Harry hadn’t lost one father that rainy November morning— she’d lost three, each as painful as the next), and asked, “Where’s Remus?” 

“He’s in London— We’re in London,” Sirius replied, his voice raspy and warm, just like Harry remembered. He sounded ashamed, almost, for just how long it had taken him to speak up, “I know this is a lot for you to process right now, but we— Remus and I— we want you to know that if you need somewhere to stay, you’re always welcome. We miss you, Harry.” There were roughly a million and one things that Harry wanted to say in that very moment _(who do you think you are how could you it’s too late my whole life’s been ruined already why now why now why now?_ ), but instead, she took a deep breath and kept it all inside, just like she’d done for the past fifteen years. This was a man who’d spent over a decade in solitary confinement— she knew that all he wanted was a response, something, anything at all. And somewhere deep, deep down inside, she knew that he was just as hurt as she was, that he also lost a brother, a best friend, a lover. She also knew that silence would hurt him the most, so she gave him nothing

“Say hello to your mother for me, Ronald,” Sirius said, finally, as he grabbed some powder off the mantle and tossed it into the fireplace, turning it a blazing green, “Tell her Remus and I are still on for Sunday brunch, if she is.” And with that, Sirius Black brushed off his suit, stepped into the fireplace, and disappeared once again. 

“Noo, don’t take my dragon away, daddy,” Draco mumbled, rolling across the floor. Harry couldn’t help but admire her exemplary diligence at being the center of attention, even when drunk and unconscious. 

“Well, time to move this one, then,” Ginny decided, and carried her bridal style to the couch, then set her down gently. Harry wondered why they were being so good to Draco, if they really were on her side. Maybe they were just good people— Maybe they knew what it was like, to be a little kid caught up in something much more sinister than yourself. 

“You’ve got to let us help you, Harry,” Hermione insisted, lips pursed and eyebrows stern, “If you let yourself bleed out any longer, you’ll end up dying of either dehydration or infection, or both.”

Harry reached down to feel her gut, which was slashed open and trickling blood; what a shame— she really did like this dress. She nodded at Hermione, and let her guide her to the bathroom. She may be extremely stubborn and just the slightest bit stupid, but she also knew that Hermione was right; if she delayed her wounds any longer, she’d end up in the ICU, and that was never a fun time.

 _Pretty,_ Harry thought, as she sat in the empty bathtub, watching the patterns swirl on the tiles overhead. Hermione was on her tip-toes, scouring through the medicine cabinet and looking stressed, which really did not make Harry feel any better. “What’s a willstone?”

“They’re your magical core,” Hermione explained, in a tone that let Harry know that this was something she did quite often, “They centralize your magic and help regulate it through your body. It’s really tough to explain, and different cultures have interpreted them in loads of different ways, but I think the simplest way to break it down is biology— they’re like when your cells convert chemical energy to ATP, so essentially unusable energy to usable energy. Willstones convert unusable energy— the energy naturally found in the atmosphere— to usable energy— power within us, that we can use for spells, potions, healing, the lot of it.”

“Why don’t I have one?” Harry asked, curling her knuckles against the edge of the tub as Hermione poured antiseptic over her wound.

“Again, it differs from culture to culture, but most kids here get them at age eleven, when we start magical schooling. Your parents died when you were only seven, so it’s likely they just never had the chance to bond you to one. It’s a pretty big deal, for English wizarding families, the bonding ritual. You might even have a stone, tucked away somewhere safe.”

“So if I’m… magic, too, then why am I so sensitive to them? Everytime I’m in a room with more than two willstones, I get nauseous.” Harry asked, drawing in a breath as Hermione ran her hand across the wound, muttering in a far away language, her willstone glowing in the hollow of her throat. Harry could feel her skin knit itself back together beneath her palms— it was a strangely satisfying feeling.

“Magic can be really overwhelming to your body, to say the least. That’s why we need willstones; without them, it’s just a bunch of raw energy everywhere, fraying at your nerves and messing with your body’s natural balance. Cases like yours aren’t common; magic is precious, so wizards don’t tend to leave many orphans, or bastards. But usually, wizards without willstones are drawn to magic when it’s in small quantities, and repulsed from it when it’s in abundance. The fact that you were able to do anything substantial without a willstone is really quite remarkable.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not the first girl to call my willy remarkable,” Harry half-grinned, half-winced as Hermione tightened the final piece of gauze around her waist. 

“You’re a funny one, aren’t you?” Hermione laughed, leaning against the door. Her hands were stained red with blood and antiseptic, and Harry couldn’t help but feel grateful. “Jokes aside, though, you’ve taken this all pretty well. We were expecting more shock, and a lot more denial.”

“I don’t like wasting time.” Harry replied, and closed her eyes.

**_HARRINGAY DISTRICT, LONDON, ENGLAND 0030 JAN 4 2003_ **

When Harry looked at the Daily Prophet warehouse, all she saw was a broken mirror of herself. The towering aluminum walls were riddled with rust and faded with sun, half-heartedly locked away for decades, and not a single soul had ever bothered to transgress. She felt a strange kinship with this run-down, forgotten old building tucked away in the edges of London, felt the faint echo of all the stories it held as she ran her fingers across the ragged walls and pushed the door open, slowly, gently, wary to its needs and responsive to its reactions. And when the Daily Prophet warehouse looked at Harry, all it saw was a broken mirror of itself; a faux-fierce little girl in a white button down, sleeves rolled up and heart tucked in, locked away in her rattling ribcage for decades, and not a single soul had ever bothered to transgress. 

As she strode through the dimly lit halls, she couldn’t help but replay the last couple of days in her memory: the party, the Burrow, Hermione, Sirius, Draco. She’d woken up in the bathtub— no one could move her, not even Ginny— with a sore neck and even more questions to ask. She demanded to be bonded immediately, and lucky for her, the Weasleys happened to have a patch of willstones in their backyard, fresh for the picking just in case another one decided to pop out. Hermione insisted on giving her a rundown of everything she wasn’t allowed to do, first— the Dark Arts, blood magic, and the Unforgivable Curses. The ritual itself was strange, but not too difficult; a fire, some chanting, an oath, some pain— nothing Harry hadn’t encountered before. She picked the stone out herself: a bloodstone, emerald green and flecked in scarlet, smooth and pretty as a dragon’s egg. Speaking of dragons— she thought of Draco, who had slipped away sometime in the early morning, without a single trace; even the throw-pillows were perfectly in place. 

That morning, they ate together. Ron prepared a full English brekkie: blueberry pancakes and fresh orange juice and eggs from the garden and real bacon, fried in real butter. Harry hadn’t eaten so well in _ages_ , not without worrying she’d get her hand cut off for stealing. She also hadn’t had such good company in a long time (ever, really); she felt at ease around them, like she could finally let her guard down and _breathe_ after fifteen long years of holding it all in. In less than twenty-four hours, Harry had gone from being completely alone in the world, to being just kind of alone, with four complete dumbasses to keep her company. For the first time in a long time, Harry felt calm— she was happy, and she would be lying if she didn’t admit that that scared her, just a little bit.

After breakfast, they cleared the table and spread out all of Hermione’s journals instead— which was a lot, to say the least. Harry was kind of baffled to find out that someone else had been researching the Godric Hollow murders as intensely and obsessively as she had, but for the most part, she was just grateful that she didn’t have to go through it all alone. After roughly an hour and a half, they’d gathered that they were roughly on the same page: the Iraqi government was possibly involved, the Blacks were probably involved, and the Malfoys were _definitely_ involved. And then Luna snapped out of her daydreams for a minute or so (Harry had never been so sure someone did shrooms in her life) to tell them that she remembered her father mentioning a Daily Prophet warehouse the Malfoys used to store their more illicit wire transfer records, and so here Harry was, in a 30,000 square feet warehouse with a shining stone hanging around her neck and no idea where the fuck to start looking.

So she wandered, running her hand across the shelves and letting her thoughts roam, lost in the twisting forests of her own thoughts. She rubbed the ring on her finger as she walked, taking it off one finger and slipping it onto the next— it fit perfectly, no matter where she kept it, a slithering baby serpent. She’d forgotten Draco had given her it at all, and she knew she should’ve tossed it away as soon as she noticed, but she just couldn’t help it; it was pretty, and Harry had a strange affinity for pretty, misplaced things. 

Then Harry turned a corner and found Draco Malfoy amid the scattered papers and broken bottles, her limbs writhing in unnatural positions, splayed out on the floor like a dying animal. Her skirt was all torn up and her top smothered in dust; she was suffering, but she was making no sound at all— only silent tears, streaming down her grubby face, shining white rivers among the dirt. She recognized the curse— _She’s using Crucio on herself,_ Harry realized, and something inside of her broke.

Draco didn’t seem to notice Harry at all, too caught up in her own torment to acknowledge her presence. _It’s a monster,_ Harry tried to convince herself, _She let Cedric die— Her father killed yours. Be angry, or you will be lost._ But she was already lost— she’d been lost, for a while now, and she didn’t have it in her to be angry any longer. “Stop! Draco— Please, Draco, stop!”

The last thing Harry remembered before she blacked out was Draco laying flat on the ground, lifting her palm, and whispering “ _Stupefy_.”

**—**

Draco knew she had been given a simple mission: kill Lea Mikhael. She was a loose end— a child who knew too much, because she’d seen too much. She tried to convince them that she was kin; Lea was Thea Nott’s half sister, after all. Surely, that made her a serpent by blood, and serpents never killed their own— they were bound by oath. But they wouldn’t believe her; what use did they have for a half-breed bastard child, anyway? 

She knew all the documents they couldn’t burn but didn’t want anyone to find were kept here, in this dull, barren warehouse, hidden amongst the achingly mundane. But she couldn’t find a single thing to tie Lea to the Notts; there was no birth certificate, no vaccine card, no school registration form. Nott hadn’t just covered his tracks— he'd buried them, and he’d buried them well.

What she hadn’t told the serpents when she’d begged for more time, though, was that she had already tried to kill Lea— and she’d failed miserably. She just couldn’t do it; she couldn’t look into the wide, hopeful eyes of a child, glassy and brimming with salt-ocean tears, and take her life away. She couldn’t do it, and she refused to let herself become _that_ person; she refused to let herself become her father. She was drowning in guilt as it was; there was no way she could carry the weight of an innocent life atop her own. So naturally, pain was the only answer; hurting herself was one of her finest skills, after all. 

But then Harry Potter just had to walk in, and ruin everything all over again. So Draco did what any sane person would do in her situation— she stunned her, bound her ankles and wrists to an old wooden chair, climbed onto her lap, undid the top three buttons of her shirt (for dramatic effect), pointed a pistol at the pretty hollow of her throat, and waited for her to wake the fuck up.

“Hmph,” Harry groaned as she came to, fidgeting slightly, her irises dilating as they adjusted to the harsh fluorescent lights. “Wha—”

“Shh,” Draco whispered, pushing Harry’s jaw shut with the muzzle of her gun, “I ask the questions here, Harry,” She moved the gun to her cheek, soft and caressing, “And you give me the answers.” 

“So, Harry Potter, what brings you to this grand establishment?” Draco asked, voice low and condescending. 

“I was taking a walk.” Harry spit out, and Draco pushed the gun against the side of her skull until her face tilted with the force of it.

“How did you know to come here?” 

“Why do you care, Draco?” Her name in Harry’s mouth was as sharp as a weapon, as ugly as a snare; I know your vulnerabilities, she screamed, and I will not hesitate to use them against you. “Isn’t daddy disowning you, anyway?”

“Watch your mouth, Potter,” Draco warned, and tightened her legs around the back of the chair, “I’m the one asking the questions, remember?”

“Unbound me, you bastard snake,” Harry hissed, pushing her gun away. 

“Oh, I’m sure you’d love that,” Draco purred, running her free hand up Harry’s sternum and back down again, then leaning down to whisper in her ear, “Want your hands all over me, don’t you? On my thighs, my waist, just a little bit below, a little bit above? But we can’t have everything we want, can we now?”

“I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last woman alive, Malfoy.” Harry avowed, but the fire in her eyes said otherwise. 

“Uh oh,” Draco ran the gun over the left side of her face, then the right, “I warned you once already, Potter. I don’t like girls with dirty mouths,” She placed the muzzle softly over Harry’s pretty pink lips, pushed downwards oh so slowly, until they were parting open and ready, “Want me to clean it out for you?”

Draco pushed the gun into Harry’s mouth, slowly, carefully, watched her eyes grow wide and her pretty eyelashes flutter, her cheeks tint the faintest red as they hollowed around the cold, unforgiving barrel. She felt her squirm beneath her thighs as she pushed the gun in and pulled it back out, slow and steady. She watched her willstone glow, the prettiest bloodstone she’d ever seen, on the prettiest girl she’d ever seen. Then she pulled the gun out.

“Fuck you, you filthy son of a bitch.” Harry spit at Draco’s face, wet and dirty and real. So Draco tapped the hilt of her gun onto the back of Harry’s skull, as gentle as a flower, and her eyes fluttered shut once again. 

**_ROSE STREET, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND 2335 JAN 5 2003_ **

The thing she loved most about Edinburgh, Harry thought as she swirled her nearly-empty cocktail glass, wasn’t the centuries of history infused within its gorgeous cobblestone streets, the endless array of mouth-watering restaurants lining said streets, or even the fact that 90% of scotch was made within its very borders— and trust me, you did _not_ want to get between Harry and her scotch. And yeah, maybe she did have a bad habit of acting like she was all tough and intimidating, but the truth was that her favorite part of Edinburgh had always been it’s people, and just how kind, warm, and _open_ they were; she wasn’t quite accustomed to having that sort in her life, and spending 17 years in cold, stony Britain had done nothing to extinguish the flaming hearth of homesickness which burned ceaselessly behind the rungs of her ribcage. And sure, Edinburgh was no Baghdad, but for now, it was just about close enough.

The other thing Harry loved about Edinurgh’s people, though, was just how easy they were to exploit; for a city that’d been captured twenty three bloody times, you’d think maybe they’d stop being so trusting. So when Harry first found out she’d been stationed in rainy old Scotland, she was pretty damn happy about it. For one, that night’s mission was relatively easy: gather intel from the bartender with the ugliest snake tattoo in the room. He had been a low-level serpent, recently excommunicated— he was too rich to be killed, but not rich enough to be forgiven; it was something about being somewhere he wasn’t meant to be, or shagging someone he shouldn’t have shagged. On any other day, a mission like this would’ve been an absolute piece of cake for Harry; the past couple of years had made her exceptionally good at cozying up to pretty strangers in dark rooms. Tonight, though, seemed to be a slightly different story— she just couldn’t seem to get last night out of her head. Oh, and that right there was another perk— there was absolutely no way she’d run into Draco Malfoy here. 

So really, Harry could not be blamed for choking on her cocktail the second she looked up, and was met with storm-cloud eyes (more like wet cement, Harry thought) and cheekbones so sharp she was sure they’d cut to the touch (it was a public safety hazard, honestly) and glossy-pink lips (she couldn’t even pretend to come up with an insult for those) that curled prettily around the rim of her rum and coke, tweaking into a smile as soon as she saw Harry fighting for dear life. And the worst part was, Draco fit right in— if 18th century France had a one night stand with Gothic England, the Voodoo Rooms would pop right out. Everything about it was dark and expensive, from the black leather seating to the gold-arched ceilings and glittering chandeliers; it smelled of sweet vanilla and old money, and Harry would be lying if she said she wasn’t just the tiniest bit infatuated. 

_Why did you let me live?_ Harry wanted to scream. It was the only thing she’d been able to think of, from the moment she’d woken up on the dusty warehouse floor, unbound and unharmed. “Fuck you,” she said instead.

“Yes, Potter, I think we’ve already established that you want to shag me,” Draco smirked, swirling the glass in her hand so that the ice cubes clinked together, softly. She looked _good_ , dressed in a snakeskin skirt and a black turtleneck— and it was pissing Harry off, so she twisted her barstool back towards that idiot of a bartender, motioned for another glass, and said nothing.

“I like your hair better curly, you know,” Draco said, voice low and matter-of-fact. She reached out, slowly, and tugged softly at a lone curl, watched it stretch beneath her fingertips and spring back up upon release, eyes lit up in utter delight at just how much her nonchalance was pissing Harry off. Harry clenched her teeth but did nothing, even more pissed off because she liked it better curly, too. Suddenly, she was wondering if maybe she should relax it, or shave it all off again. “For next time.”

“Did you really come all the way from England just to taunt me, Malfoy?” Harry snapped, taking a long sip from her drink, “I’m sure being an absolute twat must limit your dating pool, but surely, you couldn’t be that desperate?” 

“Actually, I’m here to do you a favor,” She said, her elbow on the table and her cheek cupped casually by the palm of her hand, “That one,” She glanced inconspicuously to the left, “Won’t give you what you want. He’s not very, well, female-oriented. Also, he’s useless— all he did was fuck Blaise in his father’s office, which didn’t go over very well, as I’m sure you could imagine.” 

Harry cringed internally; Michael Zabini was rather well known for his homophobic rampages. She said nothing, though; she didn’t know why Draco was helping her (she almost didn’t want to), but what she did know was that she didn’t trust it, not one bit.

Draco sighed, and downed the rest of her scotch in one go. But just as Harry was sure she’d tired her out, she paused, and lifted the cocktail glass out of Harry’s hand, placing it gently on the table. She shivered as Draco took Harry’s palm in hers, and ran her fingers over the tiny silver snake glittering just above Harry’s knuckle. “In another universe, I’d let you take me home.”

**_KENSINGTON GARDENS, LONDON, ENGLAND 2234 FEB 1 2003_ **

February 1st, 2003 marked exactly one month since Harry Potter had last felt her heart beating inside her chest. She wasn’t dead just yet— she wasn’t _that_ lucky. Rather, it was that now, every time her body was pumped full with adrenaline, be it from pre-mission nerves or the sound of late-night footsteps outside her door or snake-mouthed girls with hollow eyes and empty smiles, she felt every flutter, every skip and pause, all pumping into the dark, dark stone hanging just below the hollow of her throat. And so that night, as Harry ran and ran and ran, she could hear her heart much louder than ever before.

The fact that she never wore her glasses on night runs probably made things much worse. She knew it was both very stupid and very dangerous, but she’d never had much reason to care; no one but her boss would miss her. Really, she found the galvanizing fear to be a rather vital component in improving her mile minutes. But she couldn’t help but think that that had changed, in the past week— she’d seen Ron and Hermione almost every day, poring over document after document and brainstorming for hours, all to no avail. Every so often another member of their quirky and obscure group of friends would pop in through the fireplace (which Harry couldn’t get used to, no matter how many times Hermione explained that it— she’d honestly rather them pop out of thin air), with Ginny being by far the most useless and Dean being the most helpful, although his boyfriend did “accidentally” blow up the back porch. It was really easy for the three of them to fall into a pattern— Hermione had endless patience and brilliant cross-referencing skills, Harry had unkillable motivation and a good eye for ostensible details, and Ron was really, really good at doing what he’s meant to and doing it well. She wasn’t used to feeling so _at ease_ around others, and it almost put her on edge, as if it was all just a hyper-detailed fever dream and she was bound to wake up at any moment, disoriented and alone.

So Harry focused on the sound of her beat-up trainers hitting the pavement as she ran, the _tik-tik-tik_ of aglets against cement, the faint whisper of far-away conversations, of her own heaving breaths. She couldn't help just how much she loved the way her shitty vision blurred each street light into its own little moon, how each face she passed was as beige and insignificant as the next, a swirling world of indecipherable colors, like a living, breathing Monet. She imagined that this was the start of a poorly-funded horror film, and she was nothing more than a disposable character, killed off for the shock factor before anything interesting had even happened. The thought was positively morbid, and she loved that— finally, she’d have no duty to fulfill, no souls to avenge.

It was safe to say that that night, Harry was not in a particularly cheerful or forgiving mood. So really, no one could blame her for greeting Malfoy with a right hook the second she opened her mouth— _no one_ could sneak up on Harry twice, and she knew the bittersweet cadence of her voice by now. “Stop fucking following me,” Harry spat, the air escaping her lungs in loud, irregular cycles. She took a moment to look at Draco, to _really_ look at her: spread out on the concrete, pretty little hand cupped against her bleeding nose, dripping blooming crimson flowers onto her white top. Her pale hair was falling out of its ponytail and her light eyebrows furrowed in concentration, as if she could move the blood back into her body by force of sheer will alone. She couldn’t help but remember the first time she’d met Draco Malfoy, and just how different she’d been then. Her eyes had been filled with an unquenchable fire, a combination of mischief and bloodlust and the thrill of girls who had never been taught the word “no”. But they were empty now, weighed down by bags the color of bruises and hyacinth and falling night. She was skinnier, smaller, talked less and listened more— she’d been stripped of her invincibility. _This is what death does to people,_ Harry thought.

“You'd make an excellent serpent,” Draco replied, her teeth stained bright red.

“I'm afraid I'm not too well versed in the art of being an absolute vile piece of shit,” Harry said, voice faux-calm and level, “I’m not made of the filth you are.” 

But she didn’t mean that— nothing about Draco was even remotely filthy. She was spotless, every arch and bow in her face precisely drawn and every movement of her body strictly calculated, a macabre version of a prima ballerina. When Harry looked at Draco, she saw equal parts wolf and snake, and she wondered which side would win. 

“No, you’re not,” Draco replied, wiping the back of her hand across her face, a streak of red painting her cheek, “But you’re brilliant at pretending you are.” 

Harry said nothing. She just stood there and let the night wash over her, stood there until the words no longer rang like truth in the chilly winter air and Draco stood up, brushed the dirt off her clothes and said, “In another universe, you are not afraid.”

**_FITZROVIA, LONDON, ENGLAND 1945 APRIL 18 2003_ **

“You reckon she’s fine, yeah? Yeah?” Ron asked, chewing tirelessly at his bottom lip; Hermione was meant to be back from her recon almost 30 minutes ago, and Ron’s leg hadn’t stopped bouncing since. 

“I’m sure she is, mate,” Harry said, trying her best to be reassuring. She wasn’t used to dealing with other people’s emotions, and with Ron, there tended to be a whole lot of them, “She’s more capable than both of us combined. She’ll be fine, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Ron sighed, but it was clear he was far elsewhere, twisting a million different scenarios inside his head, each one uglier than the next. Harry felt a black pool of guilt swirling inside her stomach; she so badly wanted to comfort him, but hadn’t the slightest idea how. 

“I’m sure—” Harry began, but was cut off with a hastily muttered “I’ll be back,” followed by a quick scuffle of a chair, and suddenly she was sitting alone, staring at the bright red vinyl of the seat before her.

The thing Harry loved most about London, she thought, was that most of the time, it didn’t feel very much like London at all. It was a million cities in one, infinitely filthy with her shark-toothed businessmen and in the way you weren’t allowed to love her unless you sold your kidneys to pay the price, but also infinitely beautiful with her warm, laughter-brimmed pubs and in the way her streets lit up every single night, shifting constellations to make up for the smog-obscured ones above; in each of these million cities, Harry was afforded the complete, devastating freedom of becoming a whole new person.

At that moment, Harry was all the way in 1960s America. She imagined she’d ran away from her small rural town, dissatisfied with the wearying expectations thrust upon a colored woman such as herself, and starving for just the tiniest taste of something real. She had no plan whatsoever— she was tired of the restraints, and craved true spontaneity— in all honesty, she’d probably end up getting murdered by one serial killer or the other. Harry wondered what exactly it said about her that all her happiest fantasies ended up with her dead in a ditch, somewhere far, far away. 

Harry had always thought that she wouldn’t be so goddamn sad all the time if she just had someone to spend it with; after Cedric, she wasn’t very keen on opening up to people. And at first, it really did seem to work— she now had a close circle she saw almost every day and an extended one every week, and they were never short on pranks to pull or pubs to crawl between. If you looked at it from the outside, Harry’s life had been steadily improving in all aspects; having a willstone meant she finally had control over her energy, and wouldn’t space out (or black out) nearly as often, and they’d even finally begun to make progress in the Malfoy-Black case. Hell, she hadn’t been stalked by the former for nearly three months, so why the fuck was Harry still so bloody miserable?

But she knew exactly why, and she was deadly afraid that everyone did too, that they could all see right through her. She didn’t deserve the life she’d been given— whichever part of the universe decided her miserable life was anywhere near equivalent to James & Lily’s must have been horribly malfunctioning. How could she ever deserve to be happy, when they’d been six feet under for seventeen years now, while the men who killed them drank their scotch and loved their wives as Sirius rotted in a dark, filthy prison cell in their place? So yeah, Harry wasn’t very happy; not yet, at least.

But for now, she was okay with just sitting here, in this pretty 60s themed diner with it's black & white checkerboard floors and the quirky license plates hung up on the walls and the jukebox in the corner playing a constant loop of Beatles classics, John Lennon’s mystic words floating through the hazy mid-afternoon air.

_“She's the kind of girl you want so much, it makes you sorry…”_

“In another universe, this is our first date,” Someone said, tone sweet as honeyed wine. She didn’t have to guess— she’d know that voice anywhere. Harry looked up, and Draco was seated right across from her, just as effortlessly stunning as when she’d seen her last. It should’ve pissed her off, the way Draco held her beauty like a knife in her hand, but she couldn’t help but respect it instead. Too many pretty girls thought they were ugly, and Harry had had enough of stupid, powerless girls. Draco dropped a second straw into the melting strawberry milkshake, and took a long sip, raising an eyebrow at Harry. _Any objections?_ She seemed to ask.

“You underestimate me, Draco Malfoy,” Harry said, but she didn’t mean it; all she could see was James & Lily in their streetside cafes, and how much her father loved chocolate but Lily had an addiction to strawberry milkshakes and he had always loved her more, more than anything else in the whole world. She had to actively fight the urge to shut down completely, to curl into herself and never speak again. _None,_ Harry replied. 

_“And she promises the earth to me, and I believe her. After all this time I don't know why…”_

They didn’t need to talk. There was no perfunctory instinct to fill the air with meaningless words, with promises they knew they could not keep, nor with answers they knew they did not truly have. Draco didn’t expect shit from Harry; she just showed up. Harry didn’t expect shit from Draco, other than to show up, and to annoy the fuck out of her, and Harry _loved_ it. But she couldn’t admit it, she couldn’t she couldn’t she couldn’t and so for now, this was enough. 

_“Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?”_

_“_ And you overestimate me, Harry Potter.” Draco replied, pulling her straw out of the drink and swiping it across Harry’s cheek, dripping pink sugar down her slackened jaw. “I’m just here to have some fun.” 

Draco disappeared, as she always did. Ron returned, and Harry watched him watch Hermione through the stain-glass window, watched the way his whole body sprang up at the sight of her crossing the street, like a flower wilting in reverse. Harry smiled, just a tiny, little bit.

_“Will she still believe it when he's dead? Girl, girl, girl…”_

**_FULHAM, LONDON, ENGLAND 0945 JULY 1 2003_ **

Like most decisions she’d made in the recent past, Harry had no idea why she’d decided to walk into _Megan’s by the Green_ that morning. All she knew was that it smelled like cardamom and honey and the air was cool on her burning skin. The sky-blue, Moroccan-tiled walls were far far away and finally, she had some room to fucking _breathe_. Sure, it was at best a watered-down version of what she truly craved, but what didn’t feel faded and dull in comparison to the endless fields of her memory, to the unparalleled euphoria of a childhood romanticized by the soft caress of ever-expanding distance and time? Because the truth was that Harry didn’t want present-day Baghdad; Fady and Yasmina Potter were long gone, and Harry had nothing left for her in those winding streets that couldn’t be accessed with a little bit of mopey reminiscence. 

So Harry stirred her half-empty _gahwa_ with a twirl of her finger (she’d _never_ get over the fact that she could do bloody _magic_ ) and moped in the corner of a hipster fucking cafe with fairylight-threaded roses dangling from the ceiling, for Christ’s sake. It was the morning after her 23rd birthday and she was hungover as hell, tracing indiscernible patterns onto the table, the pad of her index dragging slowly against the light, grainy wood. By the time she heard the scuffle of the seat across from her, she had almost worked herself up to expecting it; it had been a while, after all, since she’d been pointlessly harassed by Draco Malfoy.

 _“_ In another universe,” She began, and Harry noticed that her voice was quieter today. Draco looked up, and Harry noticed that she seemed to be slowly fading into the shadows, like the people she’d seen in far-away pensieve memories. She was shivering, despite the wet July heat and the thick black turtleneck she wore. 

“We come here everyday, and sit at opposite tables. I write clever yet heartwarming stories about all the regulars here: about the grumpy old man, standing right at death’s doorstep, absolutely hell-bent on feeding every stray cat possible before he goes. About the middle aged cashier, stuck in a foreign country where he knows none and is loved by even less, yet never fails to ask after everyone else’s kids. About the teenage waitress, so characteristically ready to run away but simultaneously determined to make every moment count, because she knows better than most that nothing in life is truly guaranteed. Meanwhile you sketch them into life, smearing charcoal onto coffee cups, across your face, somehow into your hair. Together, we unknowingly preserve this very moment into a sort of artistic immortality that not even time can wither.

“We begin to sit closer and closer, sharing mismatched thoughts between puffs of cherry-rolled cigarettes. You can feel yourself falling for me, a slow trickle at first and then a crashing typhoon of emotions, so heavy on your poor, damaged heart that you can barely bear to hold it all in. But I’m achingly cold and dauntingly mysterious— I only want what I can’t have, and you know that. So you never confess your love, and neither do I. We begin to slowly forget this place— either the owners go bankrupt, or we are simply pulled apart by the meddling strings of fate. But we never forget each other, despite the decades of separation. We grow old apart, never quite knowing what would’ve happened with the one that got away.”

 _“_ Shut the fuck up before I shove this croissont up your ass, you fucking wanker. _”_

**_ST. JAMES, LONDON, ENGLAND 0303 OCT 30 2003_ **

Harry had never been the type to sleep in; even her prettiest, most peaceful dreams had the tendency to twist into rather grisly nightmares, and she suffered more than her fair share of mortal anguish during the day, thank you very much. But in that moment, sitting on the hard, dusty floors of the London Library for the fifth hour in a row, there was nothing she craved more than the weight of a fresh, warm duvet on top of her and the type of bone-tired, 15 hour sleep that left no room for any sort of dreams, let alone nightmares.

But she knew she wouldn’t be getting any sort of rest if she didn’t keep going, didn’t chase this seemingly endless paper trail until she caught it by its slippery-ass tail. She ran a shaky hand across her face and sighed; this all would’ve been _so_ much easier if only she could speak Arabic, could decipher the endless records in their original form, rather than have to scour the ends of the Earth for barely-useful translations. But half-forgotten song lyrics and faded memories of endearingly whispered “ _Habibi”_ s didn’t exactly count as literacy, and there weren’t too many proficient English scholars, it seemed, who were interested in the oil fields of the western Levant.

It was safe to say that Harry was beyond frustrated, and arguably edging on delirious. So when she looked up from the ginormous tome of a book nestled in her lap and saw Draco Malfoy, dressed in a pair of sky blue jeans and a loose white t-shirt, wire-frame glasses balanced on the edge of her nose and head tilted back against the adjacent bookshelf, she didn’t even have it in her to be surprised. It felt odd to see her dressed so casually; the lack of skin-tight designer clothing made her seem softer, less imposing than usual. She seemed _vulnerable_ , like she’d split at the seams at the slightest attempt at unravelling. Seeing her so open made Harry feel weirdly warm, like honeyed tea after coming in from the rain or hot chocolate on Christmas morning. _You missed her,_ a part of her screamed. Harry resolutely ignored it.

When Draco spoke, every word that slipped through her lips was precisely calculated, meticulously chosen from the reservoir of thoughts stacked neatly inside her brain and presented to the rest of the world on a shiny silver platter of eloquence and charm. She didn’t always say what she meant— she was brilliant at compartmentalization, and knew which words were soft and pliable and which were sharp, indispensable weapons— but she always, always meant what she said. So maybe that was what hurt Harry the most: the fact that whenever Draco was being cruel, she more than meant it; this was a girl who made no miscalculations. Or maybe what was worse was the fact that Harry let herself reach a point where she could be hurt by the words of a girl who, in the end, she scarcely knew at all.

“In another universe,” she began, her voice soft as daisies and just barely louder than a whisper, the dim lights casting shadows on her weather-worn skin, “My daddy never killed yours. You grew up loved, wanted, in a house that was yours and with a family that would die for you. You’d spend summers in Baghdad, where your biggest problems would be making sure to pronounce your vowels right and bring enough sweets to the neighbour’s door on holidays. You’d take awkward pictures before senior prom, have a little black dog that’d follow you wherever you went, cry on the last day of sixth form because you just realized how much you’d actually miss that crappy old town. You’d live a normal, happy life, uninterrupted by neither senseless violence nor fatal misunderstandings. Then you’d go to uni, and everything you thought you knew would be snatched from beneath your feet.

“You’d run into me, somewhere warm and non-discreet— outside a lecture we were both late to, in the bathroom of a party neither of us really wanted to be at, or in the library at 3 AM, high on no-sleep and caffeine and especially prone to making very bad decisions. We’d become friends quickly, despite our differences— in a softer light, it’d be very easy to see that those were all merely surface-level. We’d stay that way for a while, despite the fact that we both wanted more. 

“You’d watch me decay, grow weaker day by day until you can barely recognize the skeleton before you, a flimsy shadow of the girl you once knew. I’d find a way to fuck it up, somehow, eventually, find a way to drag you into the mess that is my family until you were so far in, your life so intricately interwoven into the web of mine that my daddy would have no choice but to kill yours, and we’d fall right back to where we began.”

“I swear to every god in existence,” Harry promised, her voice shaking like holly leaves in December wind, “I will fucking kill you, Draco Malfoy”

**_ST. PAUL’S CHURCHYARD, LONDON, ENGLAND 2300 DEC 24 2003_ **

No matter how many years passed, Harry could never seem to outgrow the childlike sense of wonder that filled her everytime she set foot in a church. She wouldn’t say she was particularly devout— in fact, she had a lot of things to say to God, and most of them were rather unpleasant— but there was something about the grand, undeniable beauty of it all that captivated her, and St. Paul’s Cathedral was as grand and beautiful as churches came. Gilded ivory pillars held up a domed ceiling towering so far above her head that its painted angels might as well have been genuine, and the low-hanging chandeliers cast a warm glow over the vast space, being the only source of illumination besides the twinkling fairy lights strung around two massive evergreens, all decked out in holly and pine. 

Harry loved how everyone was all dressed up to impress no one at all, clad in their finest suits and prettiest dresses, loved the soft, sweet sounds of choir and the distant mumbles of happy conversation, of families and friends reunited at last. Most of all, she found comfort in the complete anonymity it brought, loved the feeling of sinking into a crowd and being but one of a thousand lost souls who didn’t really know what the fuck they were doing with their lives, either. So what if she didn’t exactly believe in every bit of scripture or pray every time she was meant to— that didn’t stop her from loving church, and everything that went into it.

Harry looked to her right, and felt her heart twist inside her chest as she watched a little girl curl up in her mother’s lap, wide eyes blinking blearily as she did her best to fight off sleep. Harry looked to her left, and felt her heart twist yet again as she saw Draco Malfoy, wide eyes as distant and empty as they’d ever been.

“I think I like you for the same reason I like God,” Harry said, after a moment of quiet.

“And why is that?” Draco asked, her voice even smaller than Harry had already expected it to be.

“You’re a constant in my life, despite all the fucked up shit you say, all the tragedies you stand by and simply let happen. But in a way, you never asked for any of it, did you?”

“In another universe, you let yourself believe.” Draco replied in lieu of answering, and there were a million things she could’ve meant by that: believe in God, believe in Draco, believe in herself. But for some reason, Harry was sure she meant nothing at all.

“Why do you keep doing this, Draco?” Harry asked, her entire body leaning into hers, quietly trembling and endlessly desperate.

“Because there are a million universes where you get to be happy, Harry. There are none for me.” And then she got up and walked away, church bells chiming in her wake.

**_ST. JAMES, LONDON, ENGLAND 2245 DEC 31 2003_ **

In the past three years, Harry had been to more superfluous balls and unconscionable banquets combined than she could possibly count; she’d seen it all, from charity galas where they served gold-leaf champagne to baby showers where the farthest you’d have to go for a line of coke was the little girls’ room. Yet somehow, there was something about weddings at The Ritz London that always managed to steal the air right out of her lungs, to make her feel like a teenage girl in stilettos that didn’t quite fit just yet. It held a type of beauty that was hard to deny, from the scarlet-gold carpets to the ceiling high mirrors to the delicate crystal chandeliers, dripping in elegance and draped in etiquette so foreign to her she might as well have shown up in her underwear. In that ballroom was everything Harry had always wanted yet knew she could never have, and Draco Malfoy was no exception.

For once, Harry wasn’t surprised to see her; in fact, it seemed as though today, she was the one doing the surprising, if the way Malfoy’s eyes widened as she looked her up and down (and then down again) was any indication. It was a Malfoy wedding, and usually, that meant dark, but today, Draco was the softest Harry had ever seen her. Her dress was floor length, baby blue flecked with gold sparkles that seemed to shift into constellations, and Harry supposed they actually might be. Her hair was pinned away from her face, laced with tufts of baby’s breath. _It must be a Black thing,_ she thought.

“I guess you’d believe me now if I told you I wasn’t following you,” Draco said. She was beautiful in a way that reminded Harry of the snowflakes piling up on the pavement: intricately complex, cold, and right on the verge of disappearing.

“Oh, so you weren’t?” Harry quipped back, but she didn’t have it in her to sound suspicious, even though she knew she probably should be. Not anymore, not after everything.

“I’m obsessive, but I’m not _that_ obsessive.” She took a step forward, so there was barely a foot of space between them, and brought her tiny, ringless hand up to Harry’s sternum. She let it hover over her willstone, hanging by a thin golden chain, and Harry stopped breathing altogether, intoxicated with anticipation. “It’s quite strange, haven’t you noticed?” 

“Noticed what?” Harry whispered; they were so close that she didn’t need to speak any louder. _I have noticed_ , she wanted to say. _I’ve noticed the way you always duck your head because you don’t want anyone to see your lips curve as you smile. I’ve noticed how your nose crinkles slightly, whenever you’re proven right. I’ve noticed that you have only one piering, in the cartilage of your left ear. I’ve noticed the two freckles just beneath your jaw, like vampire bites. I’ve noticed how whenever your eyes grow dark, your willstone does too, shifting clouds of blue-grey. I’ve noticed the way you look at me when you think I can’t see. I’ve noticed._

“The longer we spend apart, the brighter this thing inside of you burns.” Draco replied, and Harry was confused, for a split second, before the recognition settled in. Suddenly, it was 6 years ago, in the backroom of a memory she’d do anything to forget.

> _“There’s an old wives tale,” Draco said as she leaned into Harry, her voice low and smooth as skipping stones, “That our willstones have will.”_
> 
> _“That they choose us, and not the other way around,” Blaise spoke from Draco’s left, lazily resting his chin in his palm, a man with all the time in the world._
> 
> _“That they choose people and make us want them,” Pansy spoke from Draco’s right, her nearly-black eyes glowing with barely-contained mischief, “Lure them in, make us believe it’s real. Call it fate, or soulmates, or pheromones.”_
> 
> _“And you believe that?” Harry asked, leaning forward to look Draco in the eye._
> 
> _“No,” Draco smirked, eyes gleaming. When she spoke, they all listened; she was both judge and jury, both choir and conductor. She revelled in the attention, glowed golden beneath the scrutiny. “I think it’s all us.”_

No matter how hard she tried, Harry just couldn’t understand how anyone could buy into the absurd notion that love was driven by a higher force. She refused to believe that it was something that just _happened_ to you rather than something you were, rather than the first breath you inhaled every morning and the last bit of light before you fell asleep every night, something that lived and burned so brightly within you that it made the fall of Rome look dimmer than fading candlelight. Whoever thought that up was a complete idiot, Harry thought, one who’d never known love. Never met her, never felt her, never lived within her the way Harry did, in this moment and every one before it and every one which would follow— because while Harry had never chosen to fall in love with Draco Malfoy, she damn well knew it wasn’t a stone that chose it for her, either. 

“In an alternate universe, you’d be here as my date,” Draco said, but this time, there was no humour in her voice; only softness. She could feel her words twist like smoke, hook into her lungs and pull her impossibly closer. Every cigarette she’d ever smoked, every shot she’d ever taken, every bullet she’d ever fired, were all nothing in comparison to this, this heady rush, this pure, sweet cocktail of chemicals swirling through her bloodstream.

“I’d treat you right,” she continued, her fingers curled softly around Harry’s willstone, “Keep my hand on your waist so everyone would know you’re mine, only mine. I’d show you off, introduce you to every single one of my homophobic aunts and racist uncles as _my_ girl.” Harry understood now, why Draco had reacted the way she did, that very first night in the Malfoy Manor’s bathroom. “I’d piss everyone off with how little they mattered to me— how could I pretend to care about their shallow smalltalk, when you _existed_ ?”Harry couldn’t come close to describing how she felt. Somewhere between _sugar rush_ and _absolutely baked._ “I’d force you to dance with me, because I know you’d suck at it. You’d stumble and blush, like some sort of adorable, lethal baby deer.” Draco brought her other hand up to Harry’s cheek, the soft pads of her fingers moving back and forth, “Then I’d kiss you, slowly, beneath evergreens strung with fairy lights, after we’d both had a couple of drinks and nothing would matter but the little sounds you’d make and the way my hands would twist into your hair. I'd apparate you home and we’d trip over each other in the hallway of my apartment, and you’d say something dumb and wonderful about how you still couldn’t believe things like that were really possible.” With every word, Draco inched closer and closer. _All I’d have to do,_ Harry thought, _is tilt my head up, just a little._ “We’d both be there the next morning, wrapped up in each other for _just five more minutes_ because deep down, we’d be afraid the whole thing was too good to be true, that it would always be more dream than reality.” 

Harry let her eyelids flutter shut, felt the warmth of Draco’s breath against her parted lips. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, won’t you kiss me you absolute—”

When Harry opened her eyes, she saw nothing but a flower arrangement and a marble wall. She looked around— everyone else seemed entirely unphased, as if nothing had changed, and nobody had ever been there at all.

That night was the last time Draco Malfoy was seen _._

**_HERMEL, BAALBEK, LEBANON 0621 NOV 30 2005_ **

For as long as she could remember, Harry had been fascinated by sunrises. She could never quite contain the awe she felt as the sky smeared itself in shades of orange-pink, the sun crawling away from the horizon in impercentable fractions. A part of her knew that the real reason was that she knew just how much could change between one sunrise and the next. Early morning had become somewhat of a sacred time for her, and being so close to home, surrounded by tangible bits of history that seemed to thrum with an ancient sort of energy, only served to ampliphy that feeling.

She didn’t have a real explanation as to why she’d chosen to drive to Baalbek that morning; she’d woken up uneasy, drove aimlessly, and just happened to end up there. She’d been in Lebanon for over a year by then, working a bureaucratic corruption case. If you’d asked her two years ago, she would’ve never guessed that this is where she’d end up, but she knew it was equal parts punishment and protection. It was meant to serve as a warning against attachment, and a plea to be more careful with where she put her heart. Harry appreciated the sentiment, but she doubted it’d do any good; any efforts to reweave the strings of Harry’s heart were more than futile now.

She reached up to her willstone, trying to feel any magical connection to the place; she’d been able to do that, lately, at historical sites. She remembered Hermione telling her it had something to do with heritage magic, how historical sites she was ethnically connected to could somehow enhance her power, how spells spoken in her mother tongue could be up to ten times as powerful. She didn’t really understand how it worked, but then again, she hadn’t been understanding much of anything lately.

As Harry towards the ruins of Baalbek, she recalled all the mythos she’d read in her time here; the desert was a lonely place, and Harry hadn’t been much for opening up lately, so reading was often all she could do to distract herself. No one really knew who built this place— some said Cain built it to hide from the wrath of God; giants built it, at Nimrod’s command, and it came to be known as the Tower of Babel; Solomon built it, with djinns’ assistance, as a palace for the Queen of Sheba. Most historians agreed that it was a temple honoring Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and chaos, but Harry liked to think its roots stretched farther than that; after all, the name “Baalbek'' came from Baal, the Phonecian god of fertility, Prince of the Earth. Whichever god this temple was built for, its architect clearly lacked piety; it was never completed. So Harry slowly approached stones older than she was possibly able to comprehend and tried her best not to think about all the loose ends in her own confusing, tangled up life.

As always, Harry Potter was in precisely the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. Less than fifty feet away, Marcus Flint held a gun to Draco Malfoy’s head.

They weren’t alone. Lucius Malfoy stood with his hands folded behind his back, and Harry didn’t need to see his face to know that it was likely impassive, observing, as ugly as it had ever been. Narcissa was there too, but she seemed shrunken, almost wilting, a voiceless shell of a woman. Harry got as close as she could as quietly as she could, and noticed that Flint was shaking violently; he didn’t want to do this, Harry realized. He was stalling. She was 10 feet away when she noticed shards of grey scattered across the marble floors. _They broke her willstone,_ Harry realized, and a feeling both oddly vivacious and entirely familiar fired up inside of her. Draco might have been a dead man, but Harry wasn’t, and she would _not_ let them get away with this.

The gun in Flint’s hand was a magical one; Harry knew this by now, could easily distinguish the ornate gold runes engraved into the grip. But more than that, she could _feel_ it, could feel the black, heavy magic hanging in the air. The difference between magical guns and muggle guns was that while muggle guns killed your body, magical guns could get to your soul, too. How many sacrifices had been made at this very altar? How many had been slaughtered, in the past twelve months alone? She didn’t know, but what she was damn sure of was that she’d burn the whole world alive before she let Draco become the next. 

Harry wrapped her hand around her willstone and closed her eyes, gathering up every ounce of black hatred present in her body. She thought of her parents, their lifeless bodies dripping crimson nightmares onto the sheets of a bed that had previously been her sole refuge. She thought of the youthful ruddiness of her mother’s cheeks, of the bright sound of her father’s laughter; they were so _young,_ so happy, so full of promise _._ She thought of Sirius, drenched in blood and crumbling by the second, and Remus, tearing the hair out of his skull and begging, begging, begging. She thought of the way Remus’ sweaters were alway much too big, and how even now, Sirius’ eyes remained hollow and dull. The harder she focused, the larger this feeling inside of her grew, this swirling blackness, this raw, undefinable power. She felt her feet slowly lift off the ground, her body propelled by a force that was at once benevolent and also rightfully _hers._ So she honed in on it, remembered Cedric, bleeding out on the floor with a smile on his face, bastardly selfless until the very last second. She saw Draco, writhing on the dusty floors of an abandoned warehouse, her face twisted in self-inflicted agony. She remembered the months she spent watching her deteriorate, shriveling into herself, reduced to no more than a whisper of skin and bones. Harry pulled years of pain, loneliness, and desperation into the bloodstone now hovering in front of her, and pushed it all out through the two words she’d been searching for, dying for, for the past twenty five years. 

“ _Avada Kadavra!”_ Harry yelled, and blinding green light filled every inch of her eyesight, seeping out of her soul, a final thunderstorm. 

Lucius Malfoy died like the animal he was: loudly, with blood oozing out of every hole. One last twitch, a guttural moan, then finally, silence. Harry was filled with a warm satisfaction; whoever said revenge was for the weak had never felt what Harry had, couldn’t possibly begin to understand the raw power coursing through her veins. Then she looked down, and realized that the warmth wasn’t just her own morbid sense of fulfilment— it was blood, dripping scarlet down her shirt, trickling over her bare stomach. 

She’d forgotten magical guns were silenced. How could she have forgotten? She must’ve startled Flint, must’ve not seen her aim, too enchanted by Lucius’ twitching corpse. In that moment, Harry found it didn’t matter very much what happened next. She’d done it— she’d saved Draco, she’d avenged her parents— there was nothing left. She collapsed, let her eyes unfocus as the world was engulfed in shadows, slowly, slowly.

“Why’d you save me, you beautiful fool?” She heard a voice sob, somewhere far, far away. She saw Draco, kneeling above her, tears streaming relentlessly down her hollow cheeks. She was pushing down on Harry’s wound, begging, _why why why you noble bastard why?_

“I promised to kill you, remember?” Harry whispered. As the light faded, she couldn’t help but think that Draco looked like an angel, her hair haloed by the rising sun. Slowly, she began to remember.

The thing about pain, Harry thought as she bled out onto the shining ivory floors, was that it does everything it can to make sure you feel it. It crawls beneath your skin like filthy parasites, twists into your veins like the flames of hell, squeezes your organs into whiskey wet rags until all you can do is feel God’s wrath crash into you, the waves of an Abrahamic typhoon you _surely_ deserve. And what is a woman to do, when so honestly presented with all the grime and glory of death, but to beg for one final dose of cosmic morphine?

Her. It’s always been her.

**_ST. JAMES, LONDON, ENGLAND 1045 DEC 31 2005_ **

That morning, Harry couldn’t help but think that Draco looked like an angel. Warm rays of sun had begun to creep in through the blinds, casting shadows across her sleep-crumpled cheeks, the tangled locks of platinum framing her face, peaceful in sleep. Harry reached out to stroke a gentle hand across her cheek, just because she could; Draco was a heavy sleeper, she’d found out.

“Stop being gay,” Draco grumbled, dragging half of the duvet with her as she rolled over. “‘S too early.”

“You first,” Harry smiled, moving Draco’s hair away and pressing a soft kiss into the nape of her neck. “Happy anniversary.”

Draco rolled over again, peeping one eye open as if to keep her sleepiness from running away. “You know that’s not how it works, right?”

“Why not?” Harry giggled, and warmth sprouted in her chest. She was someone who  _ giggled  _ now, and woke up next to their girlfriend, and could have things like  _ anniversaries _ , someday, eventually. Lately, the future had become an exciting prospect rather than a dreadful one; that wasn’t to say everything was pink as roses, but it was definitely an improvement. Sure, Harry still had breakdowns sometimes, where she’d suddenly be transported back to Baalbek, to  _ Al Hossam _ , to Godric’s Hollow. She still had slumps, still had days when she couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed, nights when she couldn’t fall asleep without being plagued with nightmares. But they were just that: breakdowns, and slumps, and nightmares. They were temporary, and she’d get through them, because now, she had a future to look forward to, and someone to look forward to it with. 

“I’ll give you head if you promise to make me pancakes,” Harry whispered, before pulling Draco in for a kiss. It was warm, soft, slow— there was no rush, no one chasing them and no threat of impending doom. 

“I promise,” Draco said, rolling her eyes.  _ You know I’d make you pancakes either way, right?  _ she’d asked the first time Harry had made that proposal.  _ Yeah, but it’s more fun this way.  _

The thing about love, Harry thought as she wrapped her legs around Draco, was that it does everything it can to make sure you feel it. It soaks itself into your skin like honey, twists into your veins like the light of heaven, squeezes your organs into champagne drenched rags until all you can do is feel it crash into you, the soft waves of a paradisiacal Eden you  _ surely  _ deserve. And what is a woman to do, when so honestly presented with all the grime and glory of life, but to kiss the fuck out of the gorgeous girl spread out beneath her?

Her. It’s always been her.


End file.
